Note: This article is also serialized on NewsMax.com at
Part I http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/7/3/134334.shtml
Part II http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/7/7/133353.shtml
Part III http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/7/8/133729.shtml
Part IV http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/7/9/172706.shtml
Glass in Your Eyes:
The People’s Republic Presents “Your
First Window on China”
by Joan Maltese
joan@schwartz-family.net
It's the tail end of the graveyard shift in a newsroom in Beijing. Abandoned glasses of shrubby teas stand among the computer terminals, looking like biology experiments. As the on-duty Foreign Expert at China Central Television's English-language news channel, I am tapping out the headlines for the 8:00 a.m. broadcast, which have been carefully chosen and sequenced by the director and producer. As for me, I’m well versed in the verbiage the censor will require. Accordingly, I write:
· Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao delivers an important speech on how to continue using agriculture to build an all-around well-off society.
· Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Chairman Li Ruihuan says Macao has witnessed social stability and sustained economic expansion since it returned to the mainland’s umbrella.
· Plane crashes take place in Turkey and the US, killing 96.
That wraps up 8:00 a.m. I click the Submit button and go for a walk through the silent halls and cells of the CCTV-9 news offices, trying not to disturb the 50 percent of the staff who are sound asleep.
This is the headquarters of a national news service reaching millions of households in China, plus selected satellite subscribers in Britain and France, and Fox Cable satellite subscribers in selected US cities. The Fox Cable deal prompted several changes, including expansion to 24-hour coverage, since it is a hopeful spearhead into the global media market. “Your first window on China,” goes our motto. “China’s best foot forward,” is the unofficial strategy.
You’d think the place would be noisy and busy, even with the graveyard staff winding down. Phones ringing, editors needling for an exact quote, the director pressing the techies to make sure the links are up for a live interview. But not at CCTV-9—not now, nor on the evening news shift with North Korea and Iraq both on the brink of war and the Columbia space shuttle just blown up with its crew. With the exception of a handful of mostly upbeat field reports and the government-issue propaganda, our news all comes from wire services. Pull it off the computer, shape it to suit the party line, and shunt it off to the censor, at least one of whom is onsite around the clock. No communication with remote bureaus or foreign-based reporters, no exclusives, no contacts, no fussing with time differences, no pressure. It’s a good place to catch up on your sleep.
China Central Television is China’s state-controlled television broadcast service. It falls under the authority of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and has suffered the attention of the Chinese leader himself. “Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, yesterday called on the country’s mass media to create a ‘sound atmosphere’ for the Party’s upcoming congress,” began a front-page item in an August 2002 issue of the China Daily, the government’s English language propaganda sheet. China’s media were so obedient to this call that what should have been rival organizations were giving each other plugs. “China’s leading newspaper,” began a CCTV-9 broadcast just before the congress,
the People’s Daily, will run an editorial Friday hailing the opening of the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party in Beijing. . . . The editorial also notes that the thought of [Jiang Zemin’s] “Three Represents” has provided fundamental answers to vital questions.1
To add another level of incest, the source for the CCTV-9 item was Xinhua, China’s official news agency. (Is anyone trying to scoop anyone here? Is anyone watching their rival’s every comma to expose untruths? Does anyone risk losing audience to the competition for peddling pap?)
Closer to the ground, it’s harder to tell who’s in charge of what exactly or how everything fits together. There is no org chart available to employees at CCTV-9, no roster or handbook or HR department or company newsletter or all-hands meetings or any other formal means of acquainting employees with the organization they work for. Language barriers in the newsroom go largely unaddressed. Changes come down from management like thunderbolts. The budget is opaque, although it is known that salaries for Chinese staff are routinely five months in arrears.
*****
If you’re not one of our satellite subscribers outside China, you can go to cctv-9.com and watch our broadcasts to get an idea of why we’re here. China has opened up and reformed! Our news shows look just like yours! We have actual anchors who wear neckties! (Another channel, CCTV-12, has an interview set so similar to Larry King’s that it’s probably some sort of copyright infringement.) One thing management has provided is a mission: to make our employer, the central government, look good.
That’s why “Your first window on China” always affords a sunny view. When a British tourist was murdered near the Great Wall, CCTV-9 knew nothing about it. When the police shut down all the internet cafes in Beijing, our coverage never questioned the party line that it was for safety reasons. When Falun-Gong-hunting cops raided my hostel one winter midnight, putting dozens of foreign backpackers and workaday Chinese out on the street without a moment’s notice, CCTV-9 staffers were amused and sympathetic—but there was no coverage. When a group of North Koreans made a dramatic break into the Spanish embassy in Beijing that was played repeatedly on CNN, you never heard a word from us. I went down to the Spanish embassy that afternoon in March 2002 and found Beijing’s small community of real journalists. Reuters, CNN, Hong Kong’s Phoenix, the BBC—everyone was there except “Your first window on China.” When an enterprising intern wanted to do an exposé on China’s woefully unsupervised translation and interpretation business, she was told to forget it. “Why would you want foreigners to know about this problem?” demanded those in charge. The irony seems lost on them that this method of making China look good is simply exposing the country as a joke.
So they’re especially stone-faced when someone within the ranks refuses to deliver the punch line. We had a business reporter exceptional by any standards who kept implicitly asking, “But what is China reforming from? Never mind all the self-praise for digging ourselves out; how did we get into this hole in the first place?” When she finally quit CCTV-9 in frustration to work for a renowned global news service, an executive producer sat her down and threatened to personally ruin her career by informing every official and person of consequence whom she would ever need as a source that she was untrustworthy and shouldn’t be touched. When she wasn’t moved, she got a star’s sendoff: several high-ranking executives wrote slurs for her personnel file and then made her pay a full year’s salary.
But it’s natural that CCTV-9 would want her under their wing instead of someone else’s. They study the foreign press, and they know what happens when journalists go legit.
· “Influence on the rise—China’s military,” Ellis Joffe, 10/09/02.
· “Annan: China Must Curb AIDS Spread,” Martin Fackler, 10/10/02
· “Tiananmen ‘Black Hand’ Chen’s 13-Yr Sentence Ends,” 10/10/02.
· “Liberties in Doubt: Hong Kong,” Mike Jendrzejczyk, 10/11/02
· “China’s Changing of the Guard: Another murky leadership transtion leaves the world guessing,” Melinda Liu and William Dobson, 10/12/02.
· “In China, flood of fake diplomas,” Ted Pflaker, 10/15/02
These entries appear in a weekly survey dated October 15, 2002 of China coverage in the foreign press. It circulates among the executive producers at CCTV-9 and probably originates in the Foreign Ministry. The survey is comprehensive and also includes neutral-toned articles on business, sports and culture. No one to whom I showed this survey knew exactly how it was used at CCTV-9, but it’s evident that management is kept in the loop of the state’s monitoring of foreign journalism. Not one of these stories was ever covered by CCTV-9. When we want a lively domestic tidbit to lead a broadcast, here’s what we go with:
Premier Zhu went to visit an organic farm in Salzburg, some 140 miles west of Vienna. The farm has an area of 38 acres, half grassland and half forest. Products made of sheep’s milk are the main industry on the farm.
*****
It’s no surprise that our writers don’t know what a story is. There are very few Chinese over the age of 30 who do, thanks to China’s four-decade intellectual retreat after 1949. Most of our writers are in their twenties and have no journalistic education or experience. But CCTV-9 offers no training for new hirees or interns and no rewards for initiative or self-development. Incoming Chinese staffers pass an English test that might consist of reading three sentences out loud, which starts them off as deskbound writers. From there, they can move up to directing, anchoring or field reporting. The third and final rung is the position of producer/censor. Communist Party membership, highly coveted and hard-won, is helpful for the first two rungs, essential for the third. The executive tier is a sort of Mount Olympus populated by entrenched Party members who have attained their status through sheer longevity.
The Olympians are our greatest obstacle to change, according to a consultant I spoke to who has been advising CCTV-9 on competing in the global media market. With virtually no experience as correspondents, no presence in the newsroom and no production duties despite their “Producer” titles, they provide no accumulated experience and no example of professional advancement. They have no standing in the community as professionals or achievers and no status outside CCTV-9. They function mainly as two-way filters, tediously reviewing tape after tape of every broadcast and attending endless meetings at which they take directions from higher officials to pass down to newsroom staff. It is said that they hate their jobs. One of them sadly remarked at the time the business writer departed that no global news organization ever came after him; he’d be lost in a real newsroom.
As prominent as these people are in the hierarchy, they’re devoid of basic management skills. They’ve established no system to reward quality, no program to recruit or cultivate talent, no channels to air gripes or disseminate information, and no chinks in the language barrier between techies and editorial types. As for shaping a team, forget it. There are no regular meetings, with two exceptions which I’ll get to. When I was first hired, I asked the informally elected leader of the Foreign Experts why our group, at least, didn’t meet once a month. He explained that management would view this as “organizing,” something labor is forbidden to do in a country whose political philosophy is grounded in workers’ rights. So story consults, brainstorming sessions, editorial reviews, and God knows what else goes on in a real news organization, are nonexistent.
Another gap in this picture is our audience. CCTV-9 has created no community of producers and consumers. I’ve stumbled across feedback (critical) in both the Chinese and the western press, but it was never discussed.2 Since we get a free ride from the state, we don’t bother with money issues like advertising revenue and marketing surveys. And since we haven’t done our homework in this regard, we function under the vague assumption that most of our viewers are foreigners living in China and Chinese who want to improve their English. Viewers outside China are assumed to be “affluent and educated,” since after all they have satellite television.
With the stakes so limited and advancement so unrelated to performance, ignorance and incompetence are not issues at CCTV-9. When one asks Chinese staff to clarify an ambiguous point in a story, the immediate and final response is typically, “I don’t know.” We don’t do followup. We don’t do phonecalls. We don’t keep card files or directories of business or political leaders. We don’t subscribe to any online information services except the wires. There’s a buggy database of our news scripts that goes back a few months and a room where tapes of the current year’s evening broadcasts are stored, but no searchable catalog, print or electronic, of our footage. Lacking contacts, a reference library or an internal database, we turn to the internet when we need answers. Since we don’t have the technology to bypass the state’s internet censorship, we sometimes simply have to get by without answers. It’s really too bad the Voice of America website is blocked, because we have no guide for foreign pronunciations except the BBC and CNN broadcasts we watch in the newsroom. (I consider our access to these shows one of the job’s best perqs, since it is an intellectual luxury in China that barely exists outside of five-star hotels and pricey apartments traditionally occupied by foreigners.)
Our business and financial coverage is especially blind. Almost no one who works on our Biz China has any notable expertise in business or economics. I attempt to copyedit an item that refers to Chinese rural land ownership, which puzzles me. “Is rural land ownership legal in China?” I ask the writer. She stares at me in bewilderment, I repeat the question in increasingly simple iterations, and her answer is still a frightened stare. I don’t know if it’s because this 19-year-old business writer doesn’t know the answer to the question or because she doesn’t know what “land ownership” is. In the end, the censor ends the confusion by ordering me to strike out the sentence. I’m confronted with an item on auction house scandals that concludes, “Christie’s escaped by being the first to give crucial evidence.” I only want to know what Christie’s escaped—indictment, prosecution, fines? When I query the writer, she responds in some confusion, “It says Christie escaped. He fled the country.” I consult her wire copy and get the facts. I’m too sober an individual to let the anchor say on the air, “Sotheby’s was fined, but Christie’s fled the country.”
*****
There are a few things CCTV-9 staffers do need to know. These are imparted once a week at a meeting headed by an executive producer and attended by all Chinese staff who are not on duty in the newsroom. Foreign Experts are excluded. This is where the mission of making China look good is hammered in, where Dos and Don’ts are handed down from realms beyond, where the staff is told what to cover and what to cover up. It’s a straight lecture session, no Q&A, no suggestions sought. One Chinese writer surmised to me that it’s a repeat of what the leader of the meeting himself would have gone through earlier at the hands of higher officials, who in turn had it from even higher officials, and so forth. The overall message driven in week after week is that since we are broadcasting to foreigners, there is only so much propaganda we can get away with. Therefore, we should discuss certain of China’s problems, and—crucially—show that China is handling them just fine.
That’s how a mass poisoning case in Nanjing turns out to be all about the Party’s conscientiousness. “Authorities are doing all they can,” we lead, “to save the food-poison victims.” “Upon learning of the incident,” goes a follow-up story, “leaders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council demanded the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China and the provincial government do what they can to save the others. The victims have been sent to ten hospitals in Nanjing, where over 500 high-quality medical specialists are taking care of them.” The story does not reveal that 42 people died.
There’s another meeting, less regular, for the Party division at CCTV-9. This is attended by those staffers who are Communist Party members, and sees action much more dire. The Dos and Don’ts are threats. Staff who have made mistakes are fined or otherwise punished. An especially bad slip-up and the Party can get you fired. The most serious punishment of all is expulsion from the Party, which means not only the loss of your job, but the loss of your career and personal ruin.
There were certainly no slip-ups during the second week of November 2002, when the Chinese Communist Party held its once-every-five-years National Party Congress, or NPC. This is the Chinese equivalent of electing a Pope, marrying off the Prince of Wales or sending a manned mission to Mars. You might remember the NPC as the week-long event that brought about the most recent leadership change in China, exceptional for its bloodlessness and unexceptional for its secrecy. Chances are that you don’t remember it at all; western coverage mostly consisted of journalists standing around Tiananmen Square telling a camera, “We don’t really know what’s happening inside.” It’s therefore a tad difficult to explain the urgency and obsessiveness that set the Chinese media ablaze and sent CCTV-9’s writers, censors, producers and directors scurrying in all directions, hastening to change a word here or a comma there, imperiously issuing orders, and flying to t.v. sets with the volume turned up to the maximum to absorb every wooden minute of our coverage. You would have thought it was a real newsroom, except that the propaganda reached such heights of crassness that it provoked some minor revolts among the Foreign Experts and served as the catalyst for my finally sitting down to write all this. We’re talking about an authoritarian government with a legacy of tens of millions of murders that claims it has always served the best interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people; it will later censor SARS coverage after supposedly coming clean about its coverup. Now, during the NPC, it is anointing its new elite, with the commander-in-chief of the Tiananmen Square massacre in the field of candidates and an unspecified intention to drag 1.2 billion people headlong into its latest political experiment. Imagine the kind of press coverage it’s demanding. Imagine Uday Hussein describing his own dick.
While the world was counting down to war in Iraq, the entire first block—not just the first story, but the first block—of every CCTV-9 broadcast was dedicated to the “profound historical significance,” the “major event not only for China but for the rest of the world,” the “significant landmark,” that was the 16th National Party Congress of the Communist Party of China. What was so pressing and momentous? What was the story that so desperately needed to be told? Well, that “Delegates interviewed all spoke highly of Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents thought,” that “Serving the people wholeheartedly is the aim of the Communist Party of China,” that Chinese abroad “noted that as China’s ruling party, the Chinese Communist Party is praiseworthy for its ceaseless efforts to keep the country stable and prosperous,” and that “It was a proud moment for many overseas Chinese when President Jiang Zemin stepped onto the podium and began to deliver his report at the opening session of the CPC National Congress. The event kept them glued to their screens, their hearts beating in time with their motherland’s.” If you’re not sold on the significance of these carryings-on then you’re in an insignicant minority, as CCTV-9 reported. “The CPC National Congress received congratulatory messages from world leaders including the Ukrainian President and the prime minister of the Cook Islands, as well as the People’s Party of Cambodia, the Labour Party of New Zealand, and other major political parties in various countries around the world.” Beyond all, “It was an open discussion of Jiang Zemin’s report to world’s media and delegates spoke open-mindedly and freely.”
Does management miss the unintended humor here? Do they share none of the feelings of the Chinese staff who write this stuff? I assisted a Chinese writer in creating one of our regular digests of foreign coverage of the NPC, a cherry-picking exercise meant to show that the outside world was trumpeting its admiration for these obscure and undemocratic proceedings. It was something like the old joke about movie ads—you know, Critic X says, “It was a five-star snooze” and the ad says, “Five stars from Critic X!!!” The writer wilted as we surveyed our Google hits. Every reputable news service centered on the one topic we were forbidden to discuss in any of our NPC coverage, the leadership change. She knew no one would be convinced when she tried to gush:
· Associated Press gave a vivid description of the venue of the congress.
· The Washington Post said Jiang Zemin opened the congress by cementing the party’s shift away from China’s dispossessed, which are disappearing in China, towards its growing middle class.
· Another influential US newspaper, the New York Times, said the new party congress will set a political and economic direction for China in the years to come.
*****
CCTV-9 is gonzo journalism compared to what they do at the Chinese-language news channel, CCTV-1. Their stuff is meant for domestic consumption, and it’s hard-core. None of this slipping in a few of China’s problems to sop a savvy foreign audience. Every word, every pause, every comma is carved in stone. Doesn’t matter if it’s accurate or complete or even logical. Unfortunately, because it’s 100 percent safe, a lot of CCTV-1 content winds up in the English newsroom. We’re ordered to translate and air it, using the same video and natural sound. It’s only the Foreign Experts, trying to polish this stuff into acceptable news copy, who are irked that names and sources are missing or the rationales for new regulations aren’t given. Statistics in particular are thrown about like confetti with no meaning or attribution. And with China’s population of 1.2 billion, you can get some pretty good raw numbers—quantity of cell phone users, amount of foreign direct investment—but it’s always up to us at CCTV-9 to do the math if we want to set the numbers in a meaningful context.
Even if we try to follow up, the organization lets us down. Although we’re obligated to use CCTV-1 content, we can’t get their reporters to return a phone call or fill in their swiss-cheese stories even though they’re just six floors below us. To worsen matters, CCTV gives all its press passes to CCTV-1, so we have to rely entirely on their coverage of such major events as a visit from George W. Bush or a ministerial-level news conference. The exception is, say, the August 2002 visit from UN High Commissioner of Human Rights Mary Robinson; CCTV-9 was there to elaborate on the claim that she was “satisfied” with China’s human rights record (for the opposite view see any western coverage of the visit), but CCTV-1 wasn’t there at all and never uttered a word about the visit. Domestic viewers aren’t told that human rights is even an issue in their country.
*****
When I talk to journalists from other organizations in Beijing or read western coverage of events in China, my heart beats a little faster. I can feel the development of a concept, the shaping of a story, the pursuit of numbers, witnesses and facts, the thrilling fear of violating journalistic principles. None of this is discernible in our work, and I contemplate the demoralizing flip side of this, that our listeners don’t expect it. I know that academics, journalists, even people who write computer manuals, painstakingly adhere to certain standards even though they often write in the knowledge that their readership is extremely small. This is because they also write in the knowledge that their readers get unhappy when they’re misled. We at CCTV-9 have to rely on other things—like self-respect and friendly feelings for our colleagues—for such inspiration, rather than a sense of duty to an information-hungry audience. With our history of disappointing them, they disappoint us right back.
We lead a broadcast with a Xinhua item stating that 2,500 people have died as a result of the Falun Gong’s influence. The writer makes a mistake, it’s read on the air as 25,000. I’m the only one to notice, because it happens I read the same item that morning in the China Daily. We strike out a zero for the next broadcast and never hear from the audience or management. We report on an 8:00 a.m. broadcast that China will definitely launch a manned space mission in 2003. On the noon broadcast, “the launch date is still uncertain,” and the writer tells me it may be years away. Once again, writers of the source material at Xinhua or CCTV-1 are unavailable or irresponsible and there’s no one in our newsroom who knows or cares enough to pick up a phone for clarification. We don’t strive for it either; just change the story according to the latest copy and trust that no one expects any better.
All this is pretty rough on your sense of mission, and at some point most Foreign Experts fall through loopholes of resignation. We’re supposed to be linguistic guardians at the gate, and despite the non-supportive hiring and training practices, I for one still do my best with the sow’s ears that Chinese writers bring me for copyediting. “A self-penned campus drama decided to overthrow the operational stereotype and joined the market competition in Nanjing,” writes a culture reporter who did not attend the event. “Romeo or Orthello . . . features campus-wide famous master and phd actors plus the charm of British literature heavyweight William Shakespeare, from whose books the play was adapted from.” I do my honest best to make this writer look good. But when the mismanagement undoes such efforts, I ease off my toes. Thanks to the undefined areas of responsibility, over-zealous censors sometimes decide they’re also language experts. A Foreign Expert composes the headline, “Scholars from east and west find common ground in their differing views of human rights at a symposium in Beijing.” The censor changes it: “The international human rights symposium held in Beijing closes with academics agreeing that both western and oriental countries shouldn’t impose its own values on others.” I let it stand. A Foreign Expert composes the super, “China restates its anger over so-called defense summit.” The censor changes it: “China angers over US official meeting with Taiwan’s Tan Yiau-ming.” I don’t say a word.
While there are no consequences for misreporting deaths by a factor of ten or changing the timeline on China’s next great scientific feat, there are a few things that keep us alert. One Foreign Expert came a hair’s breadth from getting fired for an item he had polished that counted Taiwan among the “countries”—not “countries and regions”—participating in an economic conference. Taiwan is “Taiwan province” or “Taiwan island.” Chen Shui-bian is Taiwan’s “so-called president.” The Falun Gong is “the evil Falun Gong cult,” which I always wonder how anchors manage to get out with a straight face. Mainland China is “the Chinese mainland” for some reason, and Chinese dissidents are “so-called dissidents.” Nepal’s Maoist rebels are simply “rebels.” I wondered aloud once if our viewers didn’t question the odd causelessness of these “rebels,” whose acts have so far killed some 7,200 people including a massacre in June 2001 that left nine members of the Nepalese royal family dead. Wouldn’t you think they’d have an identifiable motive, I asked? “Because it’s Monday,” suggested a fellow Foreign Expert. We also cherish the word “further,” meant to show that substantial progress has already been made. “With its WTO membership, China has further opened up its legal service.” “The new legal articles will further push forward the nation’s human rights policy.” “We maintained the steady, fast and healthy development of the national economy and promoted the all-round progress of the Chinese society and further improvement of people’s life.”
*****
Some people expect CCTV-9 to be an oasis of state-of-the-art technology with its being an agency of a government that reserves numerous privileges for itself. But it is after all one of China’s creaky state-owned enterprises, and besides, how high-tech does a propaganda factory have to be? There are only two internet terminals in the newsroom, both subject to state blockage of the websites of the BBC, the VOA, the US Department of Defense, Time Magazine and all geocities sites among others. The software we use to edit and manage stories is buggy, outdated, and barely maintained. Neither of the doors on the two sound booths has a complete knob. The tech support engineers, the sound editors and the video editors don’t speak English. We never do visual effects, and the sound editing equipment is generations old. There was once a more advanced sound system, but the only person who ever bothered to learn it has long since departed for a career in movie production. IT support is so bare that there isn’t even an email service for the cctv-9 domain. The most upper-level employees have business cards that read “John Lee, Executive Producer, jlee@hotmail.com.”
If the technology at CCTV-9 is primitive, the physical environment is even more so. So undeveloped is China’s janitorial industry that it was the subject of a China Daily editorial during the first week of 2003. Much of Beijing, including the CCTV-9 news offices, is cleaned by underpaid, untrained minions armed with black mops and fuzzy rags. Even the inveterate slobs on the staff can barely stand to touch a surface in the newsroom. The window ledges are thick with brown, crumbly dirt. The air conditioning vents are bent and rusty. The walls are smeared with shoe marks, spilled drinks and hand prints. Tiles on the floor are loose and broken. Keyboards are grimy, monitors are dotted with fingerprints, vents on CPUs are furry, tabletops are crusty. Peer down between the work tables and you’ll see a hazardous gutter of sticky wires, discarded papers, dropped chopsticks, candy wrappers, newspapers, a one-yuan note (yay!), any kind of garbage you can imagine. Junk dating back years is piled in dusty towers or hidden under desks, never touched and never thrown away. On summer afternoons and evenings, the stench of urine from the men’s room floats out into the hallway and penetrates the neighboring offices.
All this is reportedly due to change. Thanks to an article in Newsweek—not to any internal communication—I have learned that CCTV will have a lavish new headquarters in 2008 designed by Jan Koolhaas, that its current 12 channels will be expanded to 200 and that it will develop more of its own content. I spoke with a Chinese staffer about these developments, and the talk strayed to a new business show we recently launched. We both wondered where we’d get the talent to compete with the Asia business reports on CNN and the BBC. The trouble is, I said, CCTV-9 alienates its talent. I named the business writer who left under such a cloud as a case in point, and the staffer got exasperated, railing that you don’t have to stick to your principles, that people who compromise do just fine, that I certainly didn’t have to believe everything that business reporter said. I’ll be long gone from CCTV-9 by 2008, when the world’s journalists will flood in to cover Beijing’s Olympics and bask in CCTV’s by-then fabulous facilities, but I cringe even now at the irony, the waste. Do I want a bigger, shinier CCTV? Would I want a bigger, shinier Politburo?
I keep finding myself in a dead end with these puzzles. Educated young Chinese in the newsroom tell me the Tiananmen Square massacre was an attack on the People’s Liberation Army by vicious students, and I dismiss them as peasants. I look for better journalistic practices in a Chinese writer freshly returned from a coveted CNN training junket, only to find that she’s been promoted to censor. I help my coworkers write applications to journalism schools at American universities, and I politely refrain from asking them what they intend to do with such an education when they get back. I turn away with embarrassment from the work of another competent, up-and-coming field reporter who is trifling away on assignments about sports, the growing popularity of the Communist Party among China’s youth, and the 100 percent safety record of the Long March rocket. (It’s the engine that’s safe, he clarifies for me—and the rocket has never failed when launching China’s Shenzhou spacecraft, only when launching other countries’ stuff, like the time it blew up with an American-made satellite on it and killed over a hundred Chinese villagers.)
I am an escapee from Silicon Valley, a technical writer who took off for a little adventure at the time of the dot-bomb and made a lucky connection in Beijing. I haven’t had a formal education in journalism. I haven’t had the rigorous classroom discussions that I imagine take place about governments that control the flow of information, and perhaps I haven’t thought as deeply as others about the crucial importance of people’s freedom to pursue the truth. So my compulsion to expose it all feels more nasty than noble. My sickness with the whole scene must indicate some immense hopelessness or unspoken something among my Chinese colleagues. But I can’t see what’s behind their shrugging acceptance of their own passivity, their reluctance to batter down doors increasingly splintered and rotten that would admit the light of knowledge, their readiness to save China’s face by covering it with clown make-up. All I have for certain is some imperative to record my experiences faithfully. All I can do is to try to be, right here and for now, CCTV-9’s very best journalist.
Footnotes
1 Yes, you read that right, “the Three Represents.” I won’t trouble you with an explanation of this body of thought, but I will tell you the Chinese Communist Party has pronounced it a breakthrough in Marxist ideology, which guarantees it a spot in China’s political catechism (see also the One Country-Two Systems policy, the Three Antis, the Three Direct Links, the Four Basic Principles, the Four Cleanups, the Four Modernizations, the Four Olds, the Five Antis, the Five Red Categories, the Five Black Categories, the stinking ninth category, the Ten Major Relationships, the Sixty Points on Working Methods, the Hundred Flowers Campaign etc.). back to article
2 This situation changed a little during the Iraq war, when more people were tuned in and management realized we’d better improve our image. One day an executive producer dashed breathlessly into the newsroom and announced that we couldn’t use the word “coalition” anymore in reference to the British, Australian and US forces. He had just gotten off the phone with “a foreigner”¾credentials, profession and native language all unasked¾who complained that “coalition” connoted to him, personally, a large number of countries, and that “allies” was the preferable term. One phone call, one identifier¾“a foreigner”¾and we had a new editorial policy for our Iraq war coverage. back to article